Just as we know that the most brilliant idea doesn’t mean a thing if we don’t do anything with it, so it is in our spiritual journey. Knowing and understanding spiritual ideas does not a spiritual person make. True spirituality is to process those beliefs into the very fabric of our lives, in the way we make choices, in the way we act, and in where we focus our energies. Said another way, it has to be lived. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)

John: What I’m doing in my meditation dream is I’m describing something that you just take for granted, that is so simple, and I’m breaking it down into all of its little nuances. And in the dream, approaching it as if it is so complicated that I can’t possible figure out all of these little nuances. I can’t quite remember and wake up to the importance of all of these little nuances.

And it’s almost like I’m seeing all of this for the very, very first time. When this is in a natural flow, it just flows. I mean, you don’t think of it one way or another. It’s just like the way the heart beats, you know, it just happens. You don’t have to dwell upon how that is, but in this meditation dream I’m acting as if everything has gotten lost in terms of all of the natural component parts and that they all have to be appreciated and rediscovered all over again.

So in the dreamwhat I’m seeking to do is connect with what is happening around me, and I’m seeking to do this in a way that isn’t just limited to the way I think about things, or my sense perceptions. The reason is because there is more going on than this simple ordinariness.

I am unable to shift to a world of inner perception when I am holding on to, or adhering strictly to, a world of sense perception and mental gymnastics. The shift that takes me out of the mundane, which is the way I sort out the unfoldment of life in a mind-sense frame of reflective reference. I am asleep with my soul nature unless I bring it into a heightened awareness to take into account everything going on around me – because my soul awareness is not strictly limited by the mind-senses.

In making a shift to what is unfolding around me in the outer world, to begin with I just don’t take things so literally. Instead I am seen as being like in a waking dream in which the outer appearances that I play with routinely are part of what needs to be intertwined to a big picture, the big picture being the wholeness of life. By having this intertwined recognition and awareness, looking towards that, that is, I find myself shifted to a more meaningful speeded up perceptivity. The outer scenario before me is no longer all there is, once I make the shift to recognize this other as going on. The scenario instead is just a setup to something more meaningful that I am to be attentively noticing waking up from within.

The focus and attention that I can utilize, or connect with, has me adhering to an inner unfoldment that takes in the big picture, it sees the big picture. The big picture is that which is real, not the setup that was simply a test to see if I could access, through a setup, an inner awareness by letting go of the dense identifications which skirt to one side and veil then the perceptivity, shield from the perceptivity.

What it is going to take for the inner aliveness moving through me to be able to affect the outer scenario? In other words, what that’s going to take is the challenge I face. This means that the inner unfoldment that I am able to access is meant to be brought into manifestation through my outer presence upon the physical plane. The vibration is able to effectuate change as if it’s an intelligence being made tangible as it comes through into manifestation.

This process is designed to be effortless. The unfoldment is meant to occur superfluously, in other words just naturally, as the aliveness is consciously in a state which transforms as an inner flow the outer manifestation automatically. We do this naturally and effortlessly, and so what I am doing is dreaming this process because we seem to have lost the naturalness and that is why I’m finding myself in a dream describing the veil, or the manneristic nuances, as if I am having to pick up the pieces to start the whole process all over again.

One of the things that exists here is an image of me going into an amazing marble floored, top floor condo that was very palatial. This condo had been empty, had been left empty by me for a long time, and because of the lack of attention there seemed to be even water gathering in the floor area in the kitchen. And to begin with I was wondering if it had been leaking from the ceiling, from the roof or something, and this kitchen is just off what is on the other side of a counter, the library.

And on the counter is a device that someone had inadvertently left a lever turned that affected the way a flow needed to be and, as a consequence, water leaked. So initially I look at this and assume that it must be a leak from the ceiling but, no, it’s just a matter of adjusting this lever so that everything is okay again.

So what I was basicallydoing was looking for what was necessary – as part of supporting what is naturally there for purposes of evolvement. In other words, maybe it needed a little TLC or something. That’s what I was doing initially in this image.

It is common to think of our journey as connecting to higher things – and, of course, there’s truth in that. Yet that higher part is also within us, our higher self. In that sense, we are trying to bring that higher part of us down into the lower, earthly, everyday, matter-of-fact lower-self of our lives. That’s the work of it, cleaning up the lower to make a space for the higher. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)

John:My dream starts off where there are these levels that somehow need to be able to be lined up, and I know I can line them up and I have to adjust my frame of thinking because I’m not used to seeing how the things come together and line up, the levels line up. And I end up seeing multiple combinations where they’re actually broken in two, and in another instance they’re not broken in two.

If they’re broken in two I don’t have quite enough hands to put it in place because one layer is inclined to drop a little beneath another layer, so it doesn’t necessarily click into place. But if it’s all on one same level or various levels, I have to adjust a certain kind of focus almost like you cross your eyes, it’s a way of seeing, in other words, by which this happens and you can’t get to where this will work or happen with your ordinary faculties. You have to kind of let go of those and then there’s a naturalness that pulls that into an intertwined connection.

And if you stop to think about it, that’s when it gets really complicated. And then it’s almost like you don’t even have enough hands to be able to do it – when otherwise it’s almost like you can almost not even touch it and you can just kind of see by kind of an osmosis nature this sort of thing coming into its natural alignment. It becomes more and more hands on the more you find yourself dwelling upon it and trying to figure it out. That’s the meditation dream.

In the main dream this approach to all of these different levels and whatnot is put into action, in which my attention though isn’t where it needs to be. It’s not so much on the levels, but in terms of what is necessary to clean up oil spills.

And these are strange kinds of oil spills in that I have one mop that I generally use that’s soaked in a particular solvent, and I guess this solvent spreads far and wide because if I take it over the area of that it soaks it right up, it puts out flames if it’s on fire or whatever the condition may be. And it’s a type of mop that I can use to do battle with forces that may even try to stop me from doing this cleanup.

And so that seems to be what I do. But then I come to see that being able to, or having a calling to, do that is one thing, being able to get to where it can be done is a whole other thing. That’s the issue. That’s the issue and that’s the dilemma of the meditation dream, was how do I take and connect this stuff together, how do I make this align together? If I think about it too much, it just goes on and on and on in its complexities.

And so in this dream I’m standing at the top of what’s like a huge interstate that’s way up off the ground in which you have the cloverleafs, and all of the different turns and curves where you have the exits, and just multiple exits dropping down to this level and that level and that level. And I’m standing at the top and I can peer down over the edge as you have this road going this way and that road going that way, and I have no idea how to get to what I can see down below – but there’s a big oil spill down there.

I could run into a lot of resistance even to try to clean this up, and so this time I decide to do it differently. Before I only used one mop soaked in solvent, this time I get two mops and I’m carrying the two of them so I can clean up any spill in between, and maybe be able to take care of that one which is where I start heading to go to.

But just because I can see it doesn’t mean I can get there, because as soon as I start to get there then I have to go these circuitous routes, and I’m going through my inner eye in terms of how I have a sense to where that’s at, and I end up at a gas station where there’s a minor cleanup. And I end up where there are trucks that have been parked and they’ve dribbled a little oil. I mean this isn’t where I’m trying to get to.

And the suspense is there: how do I get to this oil spill that I saw? How do I come down and keep coming down to the point where I finally get to what is at hand that needs to be cleaned up? In other words, that’s my challenge in terms of confronting it. In other words, this is how I deal with the levels that become like veils – because until you can go from top to bottom you could stand maybe at one point and have a sense of the higher-self being able to peer all the way down and through, but when you would start coming down you have to confront the veils and stuff, and you have to go according to some pulse that you feel inside that keeps going and going and probing and probing and probing to get there, and never get distracted to the point where you stop to clean up something that’s trivial.

Yes, you deal with the stuff to some degree, and of course one of the places I stop is this gas station and the owner there is just way too busy. All he can do is operate the business he’s so busy, so he’s real appreciative that somebody out of the blue, you know nothing compelled me to clean this up, comes in and gives him a helping hand. But he doesn’t even have time to say thank you even, but I could tell he’s real appreciative because he’s busy, busy, busy. But I’m hard pressed to get to this real spill. I can feel that inside. Now, there’s a real spill that needs and is calling me to get to to clean up before it catches fire or something.

So that’s the dream. And the little meaning I wrote about it is the challenge is that of being able to access what I am able to see in my mind’s eye and upon an inner sensation level. First I have to see through, or how to get beyond, the veils that exist.

Well, you don’t really see through the veils, so you have to sense through them. There’s something that pulls you through, pulls you along, and some of these veils are even new to me. In other words, this particular spill has caused me to suddenly have to contend with veils I hadn’t realized, or turns and twists and levels that I had never realized or recognized.

Before I used to see myself as someone that just did this, but now all of a sudden I’m having to realize that it’s one thing to do this, and it’s another thing to get there, to access it, to be able to relate to it, to be able to communicate with it or whatever it is.

And it is an issue of communication, because there was another dream inside there that I can barely remember in which the issue wasn’t the knowing, but the issue is to figure out how to communicate it so that it was understandable. Some of these veils are new to me, and I am just now figuring out how to reach through or beyond to a natural connection. In the dream this coming down and pulling together what is needed is the challenge. If I can do that, I will be transcending the veils and will be able to do what needs to be done to clean up inadvertent spills in life.

What is behind the idea that life is an illusion? It’s based on the understanding that what we see and perceive most easily, with our senses, is only part of the story, and generally the least important part of that story. On a development journey we begin to learn how to see beyond the veils, or beyond the surface impressions, and into the deeper, causing realms. How do we do that? By dropping our insistence that our life here is about us and embracing the intertwined nature of everything. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)

Jeane:Earlier in the night it just felt like I was going over some dilemma in a book I was reading rather than dreaming. I’ve been reading a book and there was something in the book that I couldn’t figure out, so it felt like I was just trying to figure that out. It was about what somebody would do if they didn’t have any hands, in a way.

Then this morning I had a dream. In the beginning of the dream I seem to be going out and I’m going by a stream, by a pond, and I’m looking in the pond and the water seems rather dark, almost like there’s not enough life in the stream. Then I see a turtle kind of coming up from the bottom; that at least is something.

And then I see some frogs that are kind of forming themselves into a ball. They don’t look like normal frogs. They’re bigger and one of them almost looks like it’s made out of blue and red felt, but it’s the biggest frog.

And then I’m pointing out to a couple other people that if you take the ball of frogs and you start pulling them apart you find the biggest frog on the bottom. And I just start pulling the frogs apart so I can show them this.

Then I kind of go on from there and I’ve gone to a camp and the teacher is at this large camp and it’s almost like whatever event we had there was breaking up and the teacher has taken something – it’s actually one of those Middle Eastern drums that gets narrow in the middle and is wider at both ends – and he has tossed it out to us to play with like we’re supposed to kind of catch it and then toss it on. But we don’t seem to know how to play.

When I get it I realize I could toss it back to the teacher, but that really isn’t what he wants us to do. It’s like he wants us to send it around the circle, so I kind of toss it up to one girl I know but she doesn’t know quite how to catch it, either. I kind of throw it badly the first time but the second time I get it to her.

Then I get it back. I toss it to a guy, but he’s smoking a pipe and maybe reading something so it just hits him, and I’m kind of trying to get him to see that even though it’s hard to know how to pick this up and throw it like a ball and throw it around the circle, the teacher is at the other end and is talking about maybe on Friday nights he’s going to have like a game night or something if that’s permitted. It’s like we don’t know quite how to play.

John: It is like two dreams here, and they both say essentially the same thing. In the first dream you come across a stream or a pond that is like stagnant. It doesn’t look right to you; it has a darkish color to it.

And yet there is a way of looking at this stream and perceiving this stream as if it is an essence to the whole because you have the turtle that comes up. And the turtle is the symbolic image that carries the world on its back, so to speak.

And then you have the frogs and the frogs are the symbolic quality of yourself that you use to kind of go into and appreciate kind of a different depth, or sense, in other words, that takes you outside of your personal. And so this frog is also rolled up in a ball; it’s a round ball. And that as you take and you recognize this round ball for what it is, you are going in deeper and deeper towards appreciating the essence of what this is all about.

If you were to apply some masculine insight into this, you could have rejected that pond because of its darkish nature, which would have been a personal motif reaction that could have been taken on. And that would have had to do with your sense of it – that it’s kind of dark and maybe not in keeping with one’s personal demeanor of conceptualization might have tended to be in a general outer way.

But you instead came to appreciate this pond on a deeper level, as symbolized by the depth of what a turtle represents, in other words, going beyond just the stagnant quality of it, or the dark quality of it. And the significance of what a frog means, which has a special meaning for you, too, in terms of a certain way of being more consciously aware.

So then it’s like the next part that you mention, that has to do with the teacher, the drum is something that penetrates into all of life and that it needs to be absorbed by the whole. It needs to be taken in by the whole. It’s not something that you are able to try to keep for yourself.

And as things flow, as the quality comes about, it only comes about by way of you disseminating it into the whole. It doesn’t work if you try to toss it back at the teacher, or to try to personalize it in some fashion as yourself in relationship to something greater or something. Instead you’re just part of the whole. You need to be able to toss it around to appreciate this greater wholeness that you are.

It’s not that much different than the first dream in which in the first dream the wholeness… well, the wholeness is found in being able to see through something that others would tend to ignore or not accept. In other words, in this dark pool of water, or stream, or pond, you could have the tendency of dismissing it or not really seeing what’s truly there, but therein lays frogs and turtles, a wholeness lies beyond the typical, personal presumptions that one could have.

And this is true of everything. Everything has an outer appearance that’s a reflection, and then it has a meaningfulness that goes much deeper.